History and aesthetic of computer animation and virtual reality. Notes on Los Angeles in the 1980s and the computer animation community of that time. Miscellaneous commentary on the archaeology of the cold war, as well as notes on the esoteric knowledge as it manifests in popular culture, cinematic theory, the hollow earth, espionage, corruption in civic governance, the aesthetics of conspiracy theories, the failure of the cultural myth and other related topics.

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

The Black Aerospace Project that Was About To Be Disclosed That Wasn't

This
is an update on various posts about the possible public release of
information about a black aerospace project from over a year ago.

It
is a personal pet peeve of mine that we have on the Internet and
other venues (e.g. Aviation Leak and Space Mythology) breathless
sightings of what may be a black (e.g. very secret) aerospace
project, and then dead silence. Nothing.

Well,
nothing is a little hard to interpret. So I am going to attempt to
interpret “nothing” for my readers, and for what it is worth.

To
recap, there were some very interesting sightings reported on
www.foxtrotalpha.com. These sightings were of what appeared to be a
manned flying wing aircraft which was not the B2. More than one, in
fact. The B2 is a very distinctive plane and the observers, who seem to be respectable, knowledgeable and who took
reasonable pictures of what they had seen, were of the opinion that
it was not a B2. Well, nothing else of that type of airframe that is
manned is flying, so that it seemed to be a reasonable conclusion
that they had in fact sighted something not only secret, but also in
(at least) limited production, as there was more than one of them.

The
speculation was that whatever they had seen (and I liked the theory
that it was a stealthy tactical reconnaissance aircraft that came
from work in the mid-1980s and went into very limited production in
the 1990s) was that this aircraft was about to be made public.
Hence, they were less careful about bringing the plane back from
somewhere (Iraq? Africa?) in broad daylight and so forth.

Ok
that was the speculation.

Well,
a fair amount of time has passed since those sightings and whatever
they may or may not have seen has not been publicly announced which
means one of several things. If it was an aircraft in limited
production use, then whatever it is
still has its uses or in some way has technology that still needs
protecting and is not just ready for public release. Or maybe they
saw nothing at all so there was nothing to announce. Or maybe they were B2 bombers after all.

Actually,
I think they probably did see something but whatever. In a sense this is good news, because if it is in limited production this means it is still of value, which means that the money was well spent, at least to some extent. Alright, thats a bit of a stretch.

One
more thing, there are a variety of aerospace forums that discuss
these things. I am not a regular reader of them but this is often
where more information is found, if you have the patience to read
through them and all the tendentious bullshit that accompanies the
occasional nugget of interest. You can find them by searching for "black aerospace discussion forum" or words to that effect.